front cover of The Chattanooga Campaign
The Chattanooga Campaign
Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

When the Confederates emerged as victors in the Chickamauga Campaign, the Union Army of the Cumberland lay under siege in Chattanooga, with Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee on nearby high ground at Missionary Ridge and Lookout Mountain. A win at Chattanooga was essential for the Confederates, both to capitalize on the victory at Chickamauga and to keep control of the gateway to the lower South. Should the Federal troops wrest control of that linchpin, they would cement their control of eastern Tennessee and gain access to the Deep South. In the fall 1863 Chattanooga Campaign, the new head of the western Union armies, Ulysses S. Grant, sought to break the Confederate siege. His success created the opportunity for the Union to start a campaign to capture Atlanta the following spring.

Woodworth’s introduction sets the stage for ten insightful essays that provide new analysis of this crucial campaign. From the Battle of Wauhatchie to the Battle of Chattanooga, the contributors’  well-researched and vividly written assessments of both Union and Confederate actions offer a balanced discussion of the complex nature of the campaign and its aftermath. Other essays give fascinating  examinations of the reactions to the campaign in northern newspapers and by Confederate soldiers from west of the Mississippi River.

Complete with maps and photos, The Chattanooga Campaign contains a wealth of detailed information about the military, social, and political aspects of the campaign and contributes significantly to our  understanding of the Civil War’s western theater.

Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition

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front cover of The Chickamauga Campaign
The Chickamauga Campaign
Edited by Steven E. Woodworth
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

From mid-August to mid-September 1863, Union major general William S. Rosecrans’s Army of the Cumberland maneuvered from Tennessee to north Georgia in a bid to rout Confederate general Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee and blaze the way for further Union advances. Meanwhile, Confederate reinforcements bolstered the numbers of the Army of Tennessee, and by the time the two armies met at the Battle of Chickamauga, in northern Georgia, the Confederates had gained numerical superiority.

Although the Confederacy won its only major victory west of the Appalachians, it failed to achieve the truly decisive results many high-ranking Confederates expected. In The Chickamauga Campaign,Steven E. Woodworth assembles eight thought-provoking new essays from an impressive group of authors to offer new insight into the complex reasons for this substantial, yet ultimately barren, Confederate victory.

This broad collection covers every angle of the campaign, from its prelude to its denouement, from the points of view of key players of all ranks on both sides. In addition to analyzing the actions taken by Union leaders Thomas L. Crittenden, Alexander McCook, and James S. Negley, and Confederate commanders Braxton Bragg, Patrick Cleburne, Daniel Harvey Hill, Thomas C. Hindman, James Longstreet, and Alexander P. Stewart, the book probes the campaign’s impact on morale in the North and South, and concludes with an essay on the campaign’s place in Civil War memory. The final essay pays particular attention to Union veteran Henry Van Ness Boynton, the founder and developer of Chickamauga and Chattanooga State Military Park, whose achievements helped shape how the campaign would be remembered.

This second volume in the Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland seriesprovides a profound understanding of the campaign’s details as well as its significance to Civil War history.

Contributors: 

John R. Lundberg

Alexander Mendoza

David Powell

Ethan S. Rafuse

William G. Robertson

Timothy B. Smith

Lee White

Steven E. Woodworth

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front cover of The Ongoing Civil War
The Ongoing Civil War
New Versions of Old Stories
Edited & Intro by Herman Hattaway & Ethan S. Rafuse
University of Missouri Press, 2004

In 1997, John Stanchak, an editor at Cowles Enthusiast Media (now part of Primedia), realized his vision of “a publication that contained the best, most up-to-date scholarship on the [Civil] war, but was edited with the amateur historian in mind,” with the publication of Columbiad: A Quarterly Review of the War between the States. In the four years the journal was published, it strived to lessen the rift between the scholarly world of professional historians and the “popular” history with which the general reader is more familiar. Now, a selection of the essays that best represent the successful balance between “serious scholarship” and a narrative reading style preferred by the educated layman has been collected in The Ongoing Civil War.

The nine essays, written by such distinguished scholars as John Marszalek, Albert Castel, Archer Jones, Mark Snell, Noah Trudeau, and others, provide deeper insight into the war, introduce the general reader to unsung heroes, and correct some popular misrepresentations of history. They cover a range of topics as diverse as conflict among commanders, the supply runs vital to the Union victory at Gettysburg, the network of scouts and spies used by Robert E. Lee, and the painstaking process of organizing and publishing the Official Records. The synergy of sophisticated research combined with a compelling narrative style makes The Ongoing Civil War an enjoyable, informative work suitable for scholars and the general reader alike.
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